Red means stop

Today’s inagural European Grand Prix at the Valencia Street Circuit proved to be one that makes me wish it was still being held at Hockenheim. But there was a little incident in the pits involving Ferrari’s Kimi Raikkonen.

During his 2nd and final pitstop things seemed to be going normally until it was time for Kimi to leave, this is where things get interesting, you see, other teams use a lollipop sign to release thier drivers from pitstops while Ferrari use an innovative lighting system (that supposedly saves 3 tenths of a second per pit stop) that is in sequence with the fueling rig. Anyway, when Raikkonen appeared to have left his pit stall, the fueler Pietro Timpini was struck by the hose and fell directly on to the concrete.

At first, it was speculated that the team had shut off the lighting system after Felipe Massa was penalized for

making a dangerous exit from the pit lane, nearly crashing Adrian Sutil. But replays showed that the lighting system was still on and you could clearly tell that the green light (which signals the drivers to leave) was not lit.

What actually happened was when Raikkonen went to shift the car from neutral to first preparing to leave the pits, it suddenly lurched forward causing the incident with the fueler.